MORE ABOUT ME

Why break the waves? When starting this blog, I was reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. In it, he wrote:

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.

I remember reading an analysis of the book that went something like this: ‘from time to time, the waves of death lap at the shores of life’. Living life nurtures death.  I grew up as though in a dream, and when I woke up in media res, when my vision cleared, I came to realise that I was standing on the hot sand, seeing waves crashing on the shore, throwing up their cataracts of foam. I am there still, down to my ankles, breaking the waves.

In St Andrews I live by the sea. I go to East Sands often, with its hard rocky beach and its pier. Its presence is calming – it soaks the moon to a soft warmth and burnishes the sun into a fiery gold. From winter to spring the sun rises from different directions, the sea becomes my compass to track its journey through the months.